PODCAST: Don’t Believe The Hype – The GOP and Trump Are Working On A Plan For Health Care

President Donald Trump, flanked by House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas, and House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wis., are seen in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, Thursday, May 4, 2017, after the House pushed through a health care bill. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

As Obamacare began to fail and President Donald Trump began to shift health care policy away from the federal government and back toward the free market and state/local control, a group of free-market think tanks and leaders from around the nation began to meet to discuss what they wanted a new health care plan to look like. That effort was put on a fast track when Obamacare was declared unconstitutional by a Texas court last year. With the release of Trump’s 2020 budget, the Health Care Choices Act, the fruit of those discussions among state policy makers, makes an appearance as one option the White House seems to favor to replace Obamacare if it fails to survive its court challenge.

Health care policy expert Doug Badger, who spent time in the George W. Bush White House working with Congress to pass the Medicare Modernization Act, discusses the Act with Sarah Lee, health care policy advisor to The Heartland Institute and RedState front page contributor. Badger also goes into detail how a potential GOP-led plan will eliminate Medicaid expansion entitlements and premium subsidies and redirects them back to states in the form of grants they can then use to tailor their own health care systems for their residents. He also talks about how some of the free-market options are part of that equation such as direct primary care and HSAs, and that patients with pre-existing conditions will be protected under the new plan. The long and the short of it is this: don’t believe them when they tell you Trump doesn’t have a health care plan.